What Your Dollars Can Do

At No Kid Hungry, we say that $1 can help provide 10 meals for kids. Our donors sometimes ask: How is this possible?

It’s not because we get a bulk discount on food. In fact, we don’t buy food at all.

Lack of food isn’t the problem in the United States. The problem is ensuring that children have reliable access to the food they need.

No Kid Hungry does that by supporting school meals programs, providing grants to help people get the equipment they need to feed kids and advocating for better laws and policies.

When we carefully invest donor dollars in this work, schools and communities can feed a lot more kids. We’ve been monitoring and analyzing data for these programs for more than a decade, so we know that your support can help provide 10 meals for every $1 spent.

Of course, we had to adapt to the challenges of COVID-19. When school buildings closed in March 2020, schools and community groups had to rapidly transform their operations to feed children the meals they normally receive at school. This caused severe financial strain; the cost for school districts to provide meals during the depths of the pandemic was significantly higher than normal.

Here are a few examples of what our help looked like during the height of the pandemic:

• In Hammond, Indiana, the school district’s cafeteria staff served meals to as many as 2,400 kids a day, three times a week. An emergency grant from No Kid Hungry helped them get the equipment they needed to continue serving meals, including meal carts and temperature-controlled pans to allow staff to safely serve meals for hours at a time. During school closures, the district’s staff served over 60,000 meals to children in the community.
• In Florence Township, New Jersey, the districts’ cafeteria staff went from serving 20 free meals a day to 120 overnight. They used emergency grants from No Kid Hungry to help operate grab-and-go feeding sites where they served a healthy breakfast and lunch to students every day, from a safe distance.

Now that most children have returned to classrooms across the country, we're investing donations where they’ll help kids get the meals they need.

Here are a few examples of what our help looks like today:

• During the pandemic, we provided over $100 million in grants to communities to help them feed children - and we continue to provide grants to schools and community groups across the country.
• We successfully advocated for increases to SNAP and emergency grocery benefits to help struggling families afford food.
• We help educators and community leaders who want to feed more children, not just through grants and legislation, but through research, webinars and conferences.

At No Kid Hungry, we rely on the generosity of individual donors as well as charitable support from many companies to fund our work to end childhood hunger. Maintaining the trust of donors in our organization is incredibly important to us as an organization – and essential to our work. (You can find our most recent annual report and an accounting of our financials here.)

Our promise to you is that we will be transparent and communicate regularly about how your dollars are being used to help provide healthy meals to children in the United States.